Spring Cleaning Those Event and Marketing Plans

With the first day of Spring comes the renewed sense that anything is possible; it just depends what angle you look at it from.

So with that in mind it’s time to dust off those creative briefs, marketing plans and event strategies and take a fresh look at what’s working and just as importantly what’s not.

A lot has changed in our profession over the past year—budget’s being further squeezed, ROI top of mind and leverage replaces out of the box as the latest buzz phrase. But not all change has been for the worse; a number of new or revisited technologies, concepts and methodologies have created additional opportunities—social media, brand storytelling and visualization to name a few.

These changes create a new lens through which we can view our goals, creative, strategies and plans. It provides an opportunity to pull those old ideas off the shelf and give them another look, to step back and admit that the square peg just might not fit in that round hole, or be energized to fly in the face of adversity and try something new or risky.

In this spirit we have created our own personal list of things we would like to see head to the spring cleaning dust pan and those we would like to see given a chance to bloom as we look forward.

Creative and Marketing

Dust Bunnies and New Bloomers

Dust Bunnies	New Bloomers
Wow factor Creative	Content driven Creative
Event in a box	Virtual events
1 to many event and marketing	Community building
Slideware	Storytelling
Brand awareness	Brand value
Social media as flavor-of-the-month	Social media as an integral part of event and marketing strategies
Blue Man Stomp de Soleil* acts	Emerging talent and virtual global jam sessions

*credit to whoever coined this catch-all phrase

We are sure you have your own thoughts to add to this list (and we would love to hear about them). Whatever they may be though, we hope this Spring you find the chance to do your own spring cleaning and move forward with some fresh ideas.

"And then the day came, when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."-Anais Nin

Happy First Day of Spring!

The DoubleShot Team

Let's Get Visual!

I have to give a Standing Virtual O to the creative folks at Pepsi who developed a visualizer for all the Twitter conversations going on around this year's South by South West (SXSW) Conference.

If you haven't seen it you really should check it out


This conversation virtualizer as well as other similar efforts really underscore how hard it is to keep up with all the discussion that occurs online today--status updates, tweets, feeds, comments etc.

Sometimes our best intent to stay informed and engaged can be fruitless because of the overwhelming amount of real-time updates (particularly when you are looking at 344 new tweets just received in the last 10 mins). So topic trending applications, tag clouds, visualizers etc. can put a visual face on conversations making it easier for users to engage on their own time at their computer or on their mobile phone.

Some popular and obscure but fun apps to let you do this are:

• twistori
• twitter venn
• cloud.li
• webbr (more of a visual social network than just a conversation)
• twitscoop
• twittearth
• facebook friend visualizer
  
• twitter trend (iPhone app)
  

Has Twitter Become It's Own Country?

Twitter is being brought up in conversations now a days almost as often as Pitt-Jolie, The Obama's new dog and the Jonas Brothers.

Just this past week Ellen DeGeneres got a lesson on Twitter from Diddy and now joins the ranks of other celebrities like Britney, Martha Stewart and Ashton Kutcher in the Twitter craze.

So how big is Twitter? Well according to recent stats big enough to be it's own country.

With eight million users in the U.S. alone Twitter has more residents than each of the following countries:

• Hong Kong
• Denmark
• Finland
• Norway
• Singapore
• Costa Rica
• New Zealand
• Ireland
  
• Jamaica

Growing at 33% in unique visitors in just the past month, Twitter could fly past France and Germany and be on par with Mexico by the end of the year.

So what makes it such a phenomenon? I'm sure everyone has their opinion on this but it seems to be as simple as giving people with limited time a platform in which to have a voice, share ideas and stay connected. In today's world of economic crisis, job uncertainty and information overload; Twitter is the perfect place to let off some steam and engage in dialogue "when you want to". And best of all Twitter requires you keep it "short and sweet".

So when you are thinking of where to plan your vacation this year or looking for a quick get-a-way weekend (even though the bank statement doesn't think it's a good idea) throw Twitterland into consideration with Aruba, Jamaica and the Maldives and you might be pleasantly surprised by who you meet.

Who's Statusphere is it Anyway?

TechCrunch had a great article on the impact of Twitter and other forms of social media on blogging.

They raise the question of whether microblogging, social networks etc. are diminishing bloggers influence in the "statusphere" (great word!).

TechCrunch has come up with their own way of measuring a blog's influence (pretty much based on how many other websites link to your blog) and they argue that leading blog's have been loosing "influence" while the number of blogs and blog posts in general continue to grow.

Certainly you can argue with their way of measuring influence is flawed or there is a natural diluting of influence as the number of blogs grow etc. But what's really interesting about the article is how new forms of social media can actually expand a blog discussion beyond a web page.

When you look at the number of links to blog posts and web articles on Twitter or commenting on articles on Facebook, Friend Feed etc. you realize that discussions are transcending the blogger's world into the greater virtual world at large. Hence the blogger's community (or "tribe" for you Seth Godin fans) is growing organically without the blogger's effort or potentially knowledge.

And when that happens it certainly begs the question of who's "statusphere" is it anyway? Does it matter whether the "influence point" is given to the original blogger who started the conversation or should the "influence point" be shared among all those who spread and embellished on the original thought?

If an idea or opinion is worth stating, certainly it's worth spreading no matter how that happens.